In 2011, the NSW State Government awarded CEPAR $500,000 to fund two projects, one in finance and the other in health. The projects will involve several researchers over a two and a half year period and will support early career researchers.

The projects, funded by the NSW Government's Science Leveraging Fund (SLF), will be undertaken by CEPAR research personnel: 

• Public-Private Strategies to Support Asset-Liability Management for Retirement Insurance Products
• Investigating pathways of home and community care service use and changes over time

This research will strengthen Sydney as an international leader in expertise and innovation in financial markets, and as a national leader in proactive and cost-effective population health and services.

Public-private Strategies to Support Asset-liability Management for Retirement Insurance Products

Early Career Researcher: Ramona Meyricke

Deploying stochastic optimisation techniques to capture the inherent uncertainty of the financial and economic environment, this project will focus on issues such as appropriate capital reserves for retirement insurance products, and new methodologies for estimating systematic longevity risk, aiming to build capacity to diversify this risk through better calibrated mortality based derivatives. It will investigate how government policy might more precisely support fragile insurance markets through issuing securities which provide the potential for asset-liability management strategies to be successfully pursued by pension funds and related entities.

Investigating Pathways of Health and Community Care Service Use

Researchers: Julie Byles, Hal Kendig and Karla Heese

Australia urgently requires information to guide and monitor major health reforms anticipating massive population ageing and increasing demand on health services. Of particular relevance are the challenges of redesigning care for those with chronic and complex conditions, integrating services, and improving distribution and access to services on the basis of need. Such improvements in care require a better understanding of how services respond to changes in health state, movements and interfaces between acute, community and residential care settings, and variations in social and economic contexts. Linkages between longitudinal survey and health services use data are essential to identify how specific health service usage relates to individual changes in physical and mental health and provide the ideal evidence base for understanding these multiple, complex and pressing issues[1].

This program, supported by the NSW State Leveraging Fund, is developing methods and capacity to use routinely collected health services data to examine ways in which the use and impacts of health and aged care services change as people grow older and to provide information that can inform health care service delivery, planning and policy. The emphasis will be on linkage of health services data to population survey data; and on methods to convert these data into information for understanding patterns, pathways and costs of health and aged care services as people age. The program will also develop methods for using longitudinal and linked data to evaluate health care innovations and programs aimed at addressing the health care needs of an ageing population. By linking longitudinal survey data with health services data it is possible to determine individual factors associated with use of these services and the differential changes in health outcomes for those who do and do not use them.

The aims are to:

1. Build platforms, methods and capacities for using linked data to examine ways in which the use and impacts of health and aged care services change as people grow older including:

• Linkage of longitudinal health survey and hospital separations data
• Basic descriptive output
• Development of methods and analytical modules

2. Undertake analyses of health care use associated with major chronic illnesses and health risk behaviours, and the modifying effects of age, gender, other sociodemographic factors, and area of residence

[1] As highlighted in our previous research published: Jorm, L., S. R. Walter, et al. (2010). 'Home and community care services: a major opportunity for preventative care',BMC Geriatrics 10(26): 1-9.